Date:         Fri, 19 Mar 2004 23:05:37 -0500
From: Ingrid Shafer

“God draws straight with crooked lines.” I don’t doubt that for some people the film can become the occasion for a deepening of their faith. But I am still convinced that it comes with a dangerous payload -- the affirmation of precisely the kind of pre-Vatican II Catholicism that I find most troubling, the CUF-Opus Dei-Mother Angelica-Marian Apparitions-Catholic League-Padre Pio-etc. kind of Catholicism. While I realize that the Catholic Church is a great, big tent with space for all of us under its generous canopy, this is not the Catholicism I want to see encouraged, especially since it is already favored at the top of the “Big Top.” Reading John Allen’s interview with Caviezel gives me the creeps. The IDEA of this guy with “relics of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Padre Pio, St. Anthony of Padua, St. Genesius (the patron saint of actors) and Anne Catherine Emmerich [and] ... piece of wood believed to be from the True Cross” in a special compartment in his loin cloth is both tragic and ludicrous. It’s as though what Len Swidler calls the “Copernican Turn” in the Catholic Church ( http://astro.temple.edu/~arcc/copern.htm ) never happened!


Date:         Sat, 20 Mar 2004 02:04:06 -0800
From:        Christine M. Roussel

On Fri, 19 Mar 2004 07:52:00 -0500 Dchatman writes: “. . . Dear Ingrid, Are you arguing that because some people will not develop their spirituality beyond what they discover in Gibson's film, his film should not have been made? Is it Gibson's fault if viewers lack  more spiritual curiosity?”

I think the problem of images is more subtle than that. It occurs on many levels, conscious and unconscious, and can be positive or negative. The horror of an image of a lynching or water and dogs being used to knock down peaceful demonstrators or a burning naked child running down a dirt road in Vietnam, seared into our consciousness and memories, can indeed spur us to inform ourselves and to act against injustice, thereby bringing about good. But the images of post-Civil War African-Americans in D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation", with their evil, leering expressions, presented in a film of great emotional impact, did a great deal of harm, reinforcing the conscious and unconscious stereotypes of thousands of Americans. D.W. Griffith doesn't strike *us* quite the same way, but others do.

Third, I think that making Christ into some kind of super-hero who suffered *more than anyone else ever could or did* trivializes and insults others who have been tortured and crucified in multintudinous ways since the beginning of time and puts the theological cart before the horse. Canonizing Edith Stein because she was a "Catholic martyr", rather than because she was a Jew, or Maximilian Kolbe, a well-known anti-semitic Catholic writer, have rightly been characterized by many as trivializing and attempting to co-opt the Holocaust. Atonement theology, subsitution theology, whatever term one wishes to use, is, IMNSHO, a product of our sick human minds more than God/de's divine mind. If there is a reason why God/de became incarnate, it was *to teach us how to do what we do*: live and die. His death was awful because many of ours are, or can be, awful. It wasn't some kind of comicbook extravaganza, modelled on Conan or Schwartenegger, Christ the super-hero, totally above, beyond and separate from the rest of humanity: the whole idea was that Christ was the most human of us all: the creator of the model becoming one himself to show us how it's done or should be.

Finally, perhaps we should meditate a bit on the thought that violence and sex both largely originate in the same part of the brain, which is also the most primitive, the limbic.


Date:         Sun, 21 Mar 2004 00:27:57 -0500
From:         Ingrid Shafer

Don wrote:

But, back to Delle. She is right to emphasize the relationship with Jesus and God and that by having a close encounter with Death one sees what really is important and that worrying about Jim Caviezel’s odd attachment to relics is nothing. Caviezel needs a talking to. But when I think of people who mutter the Rosary 10 times a day, I want to object. But, then I think of people who are suffering and praying and if the Rosary is their vehicle to carry their repetitive prayer to God and to attach their psyches and souls to the ineffable and infinite and transcendental and imminent God, then I don’t object. All these things are a MEANS and are not the REALITY. I don’t know all the things that Delle did as she lay at the brink of Death, but if she had held in her hand a picture of the Sacred Heart or a picture of her grandmother, or even a Divine Mercy picture (which actually turns me off, by the way), I would not object, because it would be an aid to connecting to heaven itself. And I would feel that she is, in fact, communing with the angels and with God and with Jesus, grandma, Mary, Joseph, Patrick and Boniface.

I agree 1000%!!! You are putting into words the very reason I have often defended Catholic customs to Protestant critics, the reason I will never turn into an iconoclast. With St. Bonaventure I envision the path toward God as having its origin in the delight we take in nature, a glorious sunset, a child’s smile. With St. Thomas I affirm the analogia entis, the ’analogy of being.’ With Karl Rahner, I believe in the ‘sacramentality of the world.’  I applaud the Catholic, incarnational affirmation of the potential of matter/Mater to become ‘theotokos’ (God-Bearer), the Catholic appeal in liturgy to a person’s senses -- smell (incense), hearing (organ sounds),  sight (images). But with Paul Tillich, I am also wary of the Catholic tendency to confuse symbols with that toward which they point, the danger of  idolatry lurking beneath certain devotional practices, the possibility of forgetting about the goal as we defend our particular path (Tillich, btw, sees a parallel danger for Protestants in a tendency toward biblical idolatry, scripture viewed as literal truth, as “HOLY Bible,” rather than a means of grace and document to be respectfully scrutized).

“Caviezel needs a talking to.” YES, he does, and I am sad that I am 99.9% certain that he did not get it from John Paul II during the audience.

Ironically, both Delle and I trace our passionate reactions to THE PASSION to our awareness of mortality. The most powerful, most defining experience of my life was my discovery of the Holocaust when I was about eight or nine.

Images of piles of corpses. IMAGES! Pictures permanently tattooed into my preconscious. Indelible images. Nothing, after that moment, could ever be the same. That day, in many ways, I ceased to be a child. From then on I pursued and was pursued by the ghost of the Shoah (though I did not then know the word) -- the ghost of the SILENCE, the silence of those who should have protested, should have acted, should have . . .. Over the years, as I have explained before, I kept discovering ever more evidence of Catholic complicity in that cosmic crime, at least (quite apart from Cardinal Innitzer’s initial “Heil Hitler” -- later withdrawn) in terms of preparing the soil to feed the poisonous seed. At the moment, I am reading Ronald Modras’ scholarly volume, THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND ANTISEMITISM: POLAND, 1933-1939, and I am getting more nauseous by the moment. There is so much I did not know. I had no idea that Jews had to sit on “ghetto benches” in university lecture halls, I did not know that Maximilian Kolbe had founded the Militia of the Immaculata in 1917 while he was in Rome, specifically to convert Masons and non-Catholics (including Jews); that in 1922 he started publishing a monthly magazine that would have the largest circulation of any periodical in Poland within a decade; and that by 1939 there would be some 600 religious in the Franciscan monastery he had founded near Warsaw in 1927 to be the center of a giant publishing house. While his devotees my not wish to hold Kolbe personally responsible for the flood of anti-Jewish articles churned out by his press (especially since for several years he was in Japan, setting up a similar enterprise), those among us who argue that bishops should be held accountable for the misdeeds of their priests might be able to see the parallels. By the beginning of WW II The  Little Daily  (Maly Dzienni) had a circulation of 300,000, the monastery published a total of eleven papers/magazines, and employed 577 men. Talk about shaping public opinion! Alas, much of the nonsense that was circulated (global Jewish conspiracy, etc.) is still polluting the internet.